Polaroid Photo

Sat
21
Nov '09

The earth, with rings

My story, Jaiden’s Weaver takes place on a colony world with rings.  I spent time with Jerry Oltion and Mike Brotherton at Launch Pad trying to make guesses about what it would look like from the planet’s surface.

One of my classmates, David D. Levine, just sent me an animation of how the Earth would look if it had rings.

7 Comments »

  • http://www.askdreldritch.com Evan Nichols

    That is cool! I’m no Space Scientist, but as I understand what it takes to to form rings, Earth would have to have small moons that don’t have enough gravity to trap debris scattered when hit by asteroids or meteoroids. Instead of falling back to the surface, the debris would drift away but continue to orbit the Earth, eventually forming rings. At least, that’s what Sanguinity told me.

  • http://nkjemisin.com N. K. Jemisin

    Oh, niiiiice. Absolutely beautiful. Though I wish they’d explained how the part of the day-side earth which is shadowed by the rings would look, during the period of shadowing. Would the rings obscure enough light to make it twilight-dark? Or would everything just be sort of funny-colored, like the rings themselves?

    And the worldbuilding implications are fascinating if this was a world on which a culture developed (rather than a colony). How would that society’s cosmology attempt to explain the rings? Would they have a name for the period of ring-shadowing, in the parts of the world where it occurs? Would they mark time by sunrise, moon-phases, and ring-shift (or something)? Would they have figured out the world was round faster than humans did?

    (Sorry, this is my favorite kind of stuff.)

    • http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com Mary Robinette Kowal

      I know! My best guess is that it would give you filtered sunlight, like clouds, but I’ve got no real idea.

      I also wanted to know how it would affect weather, since it seems like a shadow falling across the earth would have to have an impact.

  • http://joeicarus.blogspot.com Joe Iriarte

    I was wondering the same thing, NK. Specifically I was wondering about creation myths.

    Sweet story by the way. I enjoyed it. I really like all your short stories, and I’m looking forward to reading your novel when it comes out.

    • http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com Mary Robinette Kowal

      Oh, thanks, Joe!

  • http://johnburridge.blogspot.com John Burridge

    Cool video.

    The plane defined by Earth’s orbit is called the plane of the ecliptic (think of the zodiac), or ecliptic for short. Seasons happen on Earth because the Earth’s rotational pole points at a non-90 degree angle to the ecliptic. If the Earth had rings, very likely, they’d be centered on the ecliptic (as the video says), or they might be inclined 5 degrees off (if the rings were formed by the moon). The sun would appear to flip-flop “over” and “under” the rings as part of the cycle of seasons (just like it does over the equator).

    If the rings were reflective, I’d be inclined to think they’d make weather patterns more energetic because sunlight reflecting off of them would be added to sunlight falling on the “summer” side of the planet, while the shadow would decrease the sunlight hitting the “winter” side of the planet. So during a hemisphere’s summer there’d be (for lack of a better term) a “ring-dog” on the ring and during winter in some latitudes, the rings would dim or occlude the sun.

    And, oh, yeah — you’d only see the rings reflecting during your hemisphere’s summer. During your winter, the rings would be a band of shadow swathing stars (and possibly the moon, if the moon’s still around and not the rings). An observer has to be on the same side of the rings as the sun in order for reflected light to reach the observer.

    Other points:

    I was hoping that they’d show more renderings of the rings at night, because a night time observer would see a gap in the rings where the Earth’s shadow blocked the sunlight. A summertime observer of the night time ring would always know when local midnight was because the gap would be in the highest part of the ring — or to put it another way, when the Earth’s shadow on the ring pointed true south, it would be midnight. Assuming the moon was still around, you’d have a built in summer time full moon meter, too, because when the ring gap points directly at the moon at midnight, the moon is receiving the maximum amount of sunlight.

    Um. Yeah. I was working on a story set on a moon of a gas giant with rings… why do you ask?

  • breadburner

    hmmm. . .

    Creation myths or the rainbow for Noah after the flood.

    A Hunter’s Moon – a hunters ring/arch/bow/path.

    Old school Sea navigation would add the width of the rings to the equation.

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